Broadband

Businesses expenditure on research and development (BERD) in 2016 is up $356 million (29 percent) compared with 2014. These results, from the recently published 2016 Research and Development (R&D) Survey of Statistics New Zealand, show a positive outlook for firms because R&D supports innovation, which is a key driver of economic growth.

Recently there has been a lot of attention on the Internet of Things (IoT) and how it will revolutionize our lives. The IoT more or less involves connecting every day ‘dumb’ household devices like air conditioners and garage doors to the internet using a built-in integrated chip and a modem. The idea is that once these devices ‘go online’ they will be able to transmit data back to their manufacturers and communicate with each other to make decisions based on ‘environmental’ conditions; a process known as machine to machine learning in tech jargon. The term itself has been around for a long time and was coined back in 1999 by British researcher/tech entrepreneur Kevin Ashton.

A new undersea transpacific fibre optic cable connecting New Zealand to the US has been proposed by Auckland based company Hawaiki Cable Limited. Hawaiki Cable, led by former Alcatel Lucent executive Remi Galasoo, has proposed to lay a 14,000 Km undersea cable linking New Zealand, Australia and several Pacific Island nations to the US West Coast through Hawaii by the end of 2015.